Max (Maxwell) when he was banded in 2008Just got a sighting report - Max from Holly & Zeus' 2008 nest at McKenzie Seeds beat the odds and survived his first year! In fact, he's survived the first 8 years! He was spotted in Tommy Thompson Park in Toronto hunting shorebirds along the beach on September 18th of this year. The observer managed to read his coloured band and reported it to the Bird Banding Lab who passed the information along to me.
Max was the only male in Zeus' & Holly's last nesting together. Max had two female siblings that year - Chaos who is in Saskatoon and Gigi who we haven't heard anything about. He has seven other full siblings - Hope, Terminator (Grand Forks), Darth Vader, Obi-Wan (Winnipeg but did not nest), Yoda, Donna (Saskatoon before Chaos) and Heather (crashed on fledging & went into care). He has four half-siblings from the year Zeus took a sabbatical and his brother Keener-Screech courted Holly - Lukas, Jackson, Brooklyn (McKenzie Seeds) & Taylor.
I should mention that is the first time we have had a report of a live, wild peregrine from Manitoba in eastern Ontario. We have had reports of injured birds in captivity at the Raptor Centre at McGill and other rehab facilities, but not a hunting adult peregrine in Toronto. One of our transmitter chicks did make it as far east as Lake of the Woods as I recall before she (I think) headed south on migration, but nothing further east than that. Question is is Max really the first to go that far? Hard to say but we have only had three Mb peregrines turn up in Alberta I believe, so our birds don't seem to like to go too far east-west it seems. Gotta love when the peregrines decide to share little bits of their lives away from home with us!
